Napp Nazworth

Once this gets going (and Texas A&M is already pushing it), you can expect professors to advertise: “Come to my college, sign up for my class, and I can guarantee you a fun-filled time and you won’t have to break a sweat.” If there ever was a recipe for non-risk-taking, entirely formulaic, dumbed-down teaching, this is it.

And that is why student evaluations (against which I have inveighed since I first saw them in the ’60s) are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance: they measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.

But sometimes (although not always) effective teaching involves the deliberate inducing of confusion, the withholding of clarity, the refusal to provide answers; sometimes a class or an entire semester is spent being taken down various garden paths leading to dead ends that require inquiry to begin all over again, with the same discombobulating result; sometimes your expectations have been systematically disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment, while extremely annoying at the moment, is the sign that you’ve just been the beneficiary of a great course, although you may not realize it for decades.

Needless to say, that kind of teaching is unlikely to receive high marks on a questionnaire that rewards the linear delivery of information and penalizes a pedagogy that probes, discomforts and fails to provide closure. Student evaluations, by their very nature, can only recognize, and by recognizing encourage, assembly-line teaching that delivers a nicely packaged product that can be assessed as easily and immediately as one assesses the quality of a hamburger.

A drunk on his way home from a bar one night realizes that he has dropped his keys. He gets down on his hands and knees and starts groping around beneath a lamppost. A policeman asks what he’s doing.
“I lost my keys in the park,” says the drunk.
“Then why are you looking for them under the lamppost?” asks the puzzled cop.
“Because,” says the drunk, “that’s where the light is.”

DAVID BROOKS: To me, the substance of it is that we have traded history for social studies in schools, that we don't do the ABC, here is what happened when.
And I notice this when I talk to kids, including sometimes my own kids. They just don't get the dates. They don't get the dates. They don't have the scaffolding of history. And they do a lot more social structure. They do cultures. They do this. They do that.
But they don't have the basic -- the facts and lineage of what happened when. And, so, those basic facts if, you don't have the scaffolding, you are not going to remember. You're not going to know how to organize it and put it all together into some sort of theory.

MARK SHIELDS: We're a lot more sensitive, but we're a lot less informed.
What is rather terrifying is the figure you cited about 40 percent of the people under the age of 29. And 80 percent, close to, over -- those over 45 do know. There was something going on in schools. The people, the older people are less likely to have gone to college than are the younger ones.
And the idea that somebody is going through college and graduating and not knowing a fundamental fact like that is terrifying and it's depressing.

• The Court is easily categorized along liberal (Breyer, Stevens, Sotomayor, Ginsburg) and conservative (Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas) lines, with one swing vote (Kennedy).
• Big cases are decided by 5-4 majorities along ideological lines.
• The Court is moving in a decidedly conservative direction.
• The Court is pro-business.
• Scalia and Thomas are the "arch-conservatives," providing extremely right-wing opinions, especially against criminal defendants. 
• The liberal wing of the court is "activist," showing little deference to the elected branches and overturning precedent. 
• The liberal wing "coddles criminals."

The rhetoric of the Ugly Party shares some common themes: urging the death or sexual humiliation of opponents or comparing a political enemy to vermin or diseases. It is not merely an adolescent form of political discourse; it encourages a certain political philosophy -- a belief that rivals are somehow less than human, which undermines the idea of equality and the possibility of common purposes.

The alternative to the Ugly Party is the Grown-Up Party -- less edgy and less hip. It is sometimes depicted on the left and on the right as an all-powerful media establishment, stifling creativity, freedom and dissent. The Grown-Up Party, in my experience, is more like a seminar at the Aspen Institute -- presentation by David Broder, responses from E.J. Dionne Jr. and David Brooks -- on the electoral implications of the energy debate. I am more comfortable in this party for a few reasons: because it is more responsible, more reliable and less likely to wish its opponents would die.

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration.  

1. Republicans will gain 25 House seats and 5 Senate seats in the November election.
2. Charlie Crist will fail to win his primary election.
   
3. Continued protests in Iran will lead to a more violent crackdown from Iranian leaders.
4. The cap and trade bill will fail to pass the Senate.
5. Joe Biden will say something stupid and have to apologize to a world leader.
   

Change and Bipartisanship

When Americans think of the National Science Foundation, they think of cross-cutting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Most would be surprised to hear that the agency spent $91.3 million over the last 10 years on political “science” and $325 million last year alone on social studies and economics.

For ease of use and immunity from political meddling, the carbon tax is the clear winner. Taxes can be applied early in the fuel distribution process, which makes the logistical task much easier. That sort of upstream application would make attempts at political interference much more transparent, as well. So what about uncertainty? The big critique of a carbon tax is that it cannot guarantee a country will come in under a pre-set emissions cap. If the desire to pollute is really, really high one year, we could find that a given tax won't serve as a sufficient deterrent, and we'll blow past our limits.

When Mr. Waxman first unveiled his plan in late March, at least a dozen of the panel’s 36 Democrats had qualms of it. These so-called Brown Dogs were mainly from states dependent on coal for power and manufacturing for jobs, and needed assurance that their constituents would be protected.

In weeks of closed-door negotiations with these Democrats, Mr. Waxman doled out billions of dollars worth of free pollution permits, known as allowances, to cushion any price shock caused by imposing a cap on emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Conservatives lost one of its most influential thinkers last Saturday with the passing of Jack Kemp.

Kemp was a member of the US House, HUD Secretary, Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996, and a star NFL quarterback.

Kemp will be remembered for his advocacy of supply-side economics, which influenced Ronald Reagan and led to the tax cuts in the Reagan’s first term. He should also be remembered as a Republican who urged his party to not abandon issues dealing with race and poverty. He was an advocate of enterprise zones, for instance, which would provide tax cuts to businesses that invest in areas of high poverty. Now that Republicans are debating the future direction of their party, they would do well to reflect on this part of Kemp’s legacy.

For another eulogy highlighting Kemp’s legacy regarding race issues, listen to Michele Martin of NPRs Tell Me More.

Update: Also, see This Week in Race.

1. Faux Environmentalism
2. Faux Environmentalism, Part II
3. Abandon Daylight Savings to Conserve Energy